So Duvall friends told me they had no ripe blueberries...
And they swore they had no ripe huckleberries...Cripes, this is the most huckleberries ever I've seen on a bush. I must not get out all that often, I guess.
The Duvall friends were interested in doing pickles and marmalade. Are you crazy! I told them that berry jam is easy with no botulism potential. And the quick pickle steps usually had the "put in salted ice water for hours" step, which means canning the next day. The only problem with the jam is what couple can really go through a quart of jam in a reasonable time and without an insulin shot?
So we picked up some pint jars in addition to the quarts we got from the other friend. They'll use the quarts in the next few weeks. I showed them what you look for when you go through jars. We got one bad cracked one, one with a rough spot on the rim (I use those, but that one gets opened and put in the refrigerator after canning), and one mayo jar. No mayo jars as a canning jar for me.
We picked berries for a couple of hours, doing grizzly bear style picking - stripping the berries, rather than picking each one. For the huckleberries it still meant a lot of stripping for a small volume and it meant a lot of cleaning of leaves, berry stems, bugs, overdone fruit. My advice: use a fair amount of water. Leaves float, and the overripe stuff tends to sink and dissolve. Still it took about an hour to clean and pick.
The first step is to measure, which is a bit of a craft, because if you pack them down, you change the volume. This is 4 cups of blackberries, 7 cups of blueberries, 2 cups of huckleberries.
We made two batches of jam - 6 pints of a blueberry huckleberry lemon combo with added pectin, and 6 pints of a straight cooked-down blackberry blueberry number with sugar. The Duvall friends took lots of notes, but they did fade in and out, something you can't do during canning. Something about hot boiling water and hot boiling sugar that keeps you on task.
Here's the waterbath canner in action, steam surrounding it.
The batches of jam. Blackberry on the left, huckleberry/blueberry on the right.
Turns out that the added pectin number did something strange. It passed my fork test for jam, which means that it would jam up, but it seems jammy at the top and syrupy at the bottom. Tastes fantastic though. The cooked jam number took forever and ever to cook - it never really fully passed the fork test - but it jammed up nicely in the jar. Tastes great, but blackberry is always stronger than blueberry in my book.
Get 'r done, the girl version
August 13th, 2007 at 02:54 am
August 13th, 2007 at 04:26 am 1186979205
I still have jam by the shelf full in my pantry, so no jam canning for me this year. I do have to get my canned juice out of the pantry & turn it into jelly...have been wanting jelly for some Christmas cookie recipes & have just been to lazy to get to this job. Seeing your water bath canner in the pic made me think about adding this job to my 'to do' list.
August 13th, 2007 at 05:37 am 1186983459
August 13th, 2007 at 12:44 pm 1187009081
*Staring in with wide-eye wonder, like a kid outside a candy store*
August 13th, 2007 at 05:02 pm 1187024577
August 14th, 2007 at 02:51 am 1187059873
August 14th, 2007 at 03:31 am 1187062300
miclason- that's the way to make something from nothing!
Amber - huckleberries are close relatives to blueberries, except that they are red or purple instead of blue. I see a few of them on hiking trails...places where there are lots of them are kept secret by the locals.
August 14th, 2007 at 05:00 pm 1187110822